Industrial organization is a field of economics that expands the traditional model of a perfectly competitive marketplace to include such real-world factors as price discrimination, barriers to entry into the market, and the effects of new technologies. When it first emerged as a field in the 1930s, industrial organization made use of empirical studies to describe numerous variables but it could not define causal relationships between them. A second wave of scholarship in the 1970s resulted in noncooperative game theory being adopted as the unified methodology of the field and a theory of industrial organization emerged. Jean Tirole set out to write the first primary text to present the new form of industrial organization to advanced undergraduates and grad students. The Theory of Industrial Organization was first published in 1988 and is still one of the top texts assigned on the subject today.

Our 50 influential journal articles are listed here. The articles are in chronological order and will be freely available through the end of 2012.

February 07, 2012

By coincidence, “eighteen years in the making” described each of the two books featured at the PROSE awards ceremony in Washington, DC last week. The PROSE awards recognize excellence in professional and scholarly publishing and are judged by distinguished industry experts. This year’s engaging ceremony provided, along with the chance to applaud several MIT Press category winners*, many good reminders about the things we value in scholarly publishing.

Last year’s winner of the top prize, the R.R. Hawkins Award, was Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by Eltis et al., a comprehensive reference work published by Yale University Press. At this year’s awards ceremony, we saw a new short film about the making of the Atlas. I can’t report on the details of this process, of which I have only a fuzzy grasp, but my lasting impressions from the film are the large collaborative team involved (including funders, scholars, cartographers, and the Press); and that team’s clear vision of the book form as superbly effective in presenting this material (to accompany an openly-available database). These impressions call to mind MIT Press’ Atlas of Science by Katy Börner, another Atlas that featured collaborative effort and vision behind its making.

The 2012 Hawkins award went to The Diffusion Handbook: Applied Solutions for Engineers by Thambynayagam, published by McGraw Hill.My grasp of this highly complex, 2,000-page hardcover book is even fuzzier, but I was struck by its evident usefulness for its technical audience and by the author’s invention of a new visual icon system for organizing the solutions he presents (the book contains a 125-page table of contents using these icons!).

The Diffusion Handbook reminded me of several of our own completely unique works, books whose new concepts required custom editorial solutions and/or breathtakingly detailed production work. These include Shape by George Stiny, Color for the Sciences by Jan Koenderink, Aaaaw to Zzzzzdby John Bevis, and The Book of Michael of Rhodes, volumes 1-3, edited by David McGee, Alan Stahl, and Pamela Long. Likely some of these were eighteen years (or more) in the making, as well.

August 14, 2009

As more and more of the value that companies are creating is not showing up on their balance sheets and revenues, it's clear that we need to start paying attention to non-market transactions and exchanges of digital goods and information. Wired for Innovation's Erik Brynjolfsson talks with BusinessWeek's Reena Jana about how important this is to the economy.

Listen to the podcast here. Watch for the book your favorite bookstore in September

October 15, 2008

As the tumult continues for the global financial system, news shows are mining the insights of economists who can explain in understandable language what's happened and what the likely long-term consequences. Given that recent events have required most of us to play catch up on the meaning of complex derivatives and credit swaps, you can't have too many.

July 18, 2008

Richard K. Lyons, the chief learning officer of Goldman Sachs, New
York, was named the 14th dean of the University of California,
Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau
announced today.

Lyons holds a professorship at the Haas School and served as
acting dean of the school in 2004/05. He succeeds Tom Campbell, an
economist, a former Stanford Law School professor, and former
Congressman, who led the Haas School since 2002. Lyons is the author of The Microstructure Approach to Exchange Rates.

Congratulations Professor Lyons! More information on Lyons and his new position (including a brief video) can be found here.

August 21, 2007

As 1.7 million freshmen enter college campuses
this fall, many of them with brand new credit cards, it might prove
useful to brush up on this industry. Credit-card companies offer rewards for airline miles, cash back, and now a new card
that gives 1% cash back to reduce greenhouse gases, combined with recent revelations of dodgy business practices it is understandable to ask, “How did we get here?”

Paying with Plastic
explores more than the history of credit cards, it examines the industry’s evolving
structure, lending practices, and how e-commerce could dramatically impact the future
of credit cards. The
authors, both of whom have researched the industry for more than 25 years, have
created the definitive source on the credit card industry.

March 05, 2007

This weekend's 'Five Best' series in the Wall Street Journal focuses on the "secrets of selling": Steve Cohn lists the top five books about selling. #1? Marshall McCluhan's Understanding Media. Named the patron saint of Wired Magazine, media theorist Marshall McCluhan coined the phrases "the medium is the message" and the "global village". According to Cohn:...the most brilliant marketing mind of all
belonged to Marshall McLuhan. "Understanding Media" is a timeless
analysis of how language, speech and technology shape human behavior in
the era of mass communication. The book is a cautionary tale for
marketers today who hear the Web's siren call and ignore the power of
the spoken word. Whether heard onstage, over the phone, or on radio or
TV, McLuhan says, the spoken word is ultimately much more powerful than
the written. Part anthropologist, part psychologist, part behavioral
scientist, McLuhan ponders many other aspects of how we connect, such
as the persuasive powers of typography. He was a genius who understood
why mass media holds us in its grip and never lets go.

May 26, 2006

Much has been made of recent news that in 2005, for the
first time since the Great Depression, Americans registered a negative annual
personal savings rate. We are spending more than we are earning and
accumulating greater debt. Experts cite a number of possible causes including
rising housing and health care costs, a consumer culture that relies heavily on
credit, and the historically low interest rates which have prevailed for the
past several years (and provided less of an incentive to put money away).

Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff has spent decades studying spending and saving habits. In his book The Coming Generational Storm, co-authored with Scott Burns, he warns of the potentially disastrous fiscal crisis that awaits the U.S. as a result of the widening gap between total projected federal expenditures and total projected federal taxes. He is also the co-developer of ESPlanner, financial planning software that calculates a household's highest sustainable living
standard and the savings and insurance needed to maintain that living standard. Despite the consensus opinion that we collectively will be in dire fiscal straits upon retirement, Kotlikoff considers the possibility that financial planning calculators such as ESPlanner are advising people to save too much. In the June 5th edition of Forbes, Kotlikoff argues that the estimates exceed anticipated retirement spending habits, thus causing consumers to take more risks with their current investing and savings plans. The full article is available here.

Although philanthropy is increasingly common in many countries, the
U.S. has the most institutionalized history of philanthropy—driven at
least in part by federal income-tax exemptions for contributions to
organizations that are certified "charitable" or "nonprofit" by state
governments. In 2004, more than 66,000 foundations with over
$476.7 billion in assets gave an estimated $32.4 billion in grants to
nonprofit organizations to support a variety of activities, including
research, health, education, arts, and culture as well as both systemic
and charitable efforts to alleviate poverty and improve people’s lives.
Foundation resources are money that would otherwise be added to federal
and state treasuries, money otherwise taxed and used for public
benefit. For this reason alone, the public should know more about how
foundations are managed. By virtue of their "power of the purse" as
well as more subtle forms of influence, these foundations are key
players in U.S. social, economic, and public policy and are also
increasingly influential internationally. So for all these reasons,
philanthropy is important to know more about. And when foundations
learn to function effectively, the potential for public benefit is
tremendous.

Your book is called Effective Philanthropy. What do you mean
by "effective" philanthropy?

While many [philanthropic] foundations, especially larger,
professionally staffed foundations, work responsibly, collegially, and
for "the common good," many more—an estimated five out of six U.S.
foundations—are unstaffed and, for want of a better word, idiosyncratic
because they are influenced by family members on their boards or
financial advisors who may or may not have "the common good" as part of
their portfolio. Given
their inherently elite status with so few outside pressures to change,
foundations are the least likely organizations to model cutting-edge
effectiveness initiatives.

Effective philanthropy succeeds at amassing, managing, then allocating
financial and human resources in ways that have the greatest positive
impact in the sectors that foundations choose to fund. To allocate
resources effectively, foundations must have vision and strategies for
their grant making that allow them to analyze issues and concerns they
want to influence, identifying both challenges and potential resources.
They must be able to find the nonprofit organizations most likely to
produce the results they intend. They must be able to structure their
grants in ways that will be most useful to their grantees. And they
must evaluate what they do to ensure they are having the intended
impacts. The
most important findings from our research revealed links between foundation effectiveness and
institutionalizing nuanced understandings of diversity, what in the
book we call "deep diversity," including gender.

Edited by David N. Figlio of the University of Florida and David H. Monk of Pennsylvania State University, the first several issues of Education Finance and Policy include important new research contributions on topics such as charter school effectiveness, the education of immigrant students, dynamics in the teacher workforce, higher education finance, and the fiscal burden of school accountability.

Articles from the current (inaugural) issue are now available for free online here.